This Sunday, 30 minuts analyzed the new generation of forest fires in the midst of a climate emergency: more active fires, of extreme virulence, which spread faster and with behaviors that are increasingly difficult to predict. Circumstances that make them more devastating for the territory and that overwhelm extinction devices.The report addressed it based on the major fires that have broken out this summer in Catalonia and Northern Catalonia, which demonstrates a good journalistic reaction. The 30 minuts team returned to the burnt areas while the land and trees were still smoking, and toured the terrain with some of the affected people. The testimony of the couple who lived in the Gavarres massif and distinguished the remains of their home among the ashes was impactful. The contrast between the before and after, with a photograph of the house, was devastating. Also chilling was the car journey accompanying the Councilor for Security of Sant Miquel de Llotes to verify that the town's evacuation had been completed, with the added surprise of finding an elderly man alone in the middle of the deserted village.The program set aside the causes of the fires, a delicate topic in the case of the one in Empordà. At some point, responsibilities will have to be clarified. The goal of the report had more to do with prevention measures and the way to minimize the destructive power of these fires. Of course, the testimony of the expert firefighters clarified many technical aspects. The images recorded from the sky, with helicopters, which showed the burnt landscape were very revealing. There were moments that seemed recorded in black and white due to the grayness of the ash and so many hectares devastated by the fire. Distinguishing a small spot of color in the middle of the landscape made you realize the enormous reach of the fire.The Molla family, farmers from Calonge, were key witnesses in the report, due to the clarity with which they presented their arguments. Especially the statements of Núria, one of the daughters, who on the night of July 3rd, with the flames on the horizon, cried in front of the TV3 microphone: “The world is burning! The earth is burning! We have to change the way we live, the way we do things! We have to do as our grandparents did! The earth is speaking! It is incredible! The environment is hot!” Her desperation went viral. And the 30 minuts, a few days later, recovered her voice and that of the whole family with more calm. Also magnificent was the forcefulness of her sister Montserrat. Her explanations about the behavior of fire and the importance of agricultural work were more enlightening than those of any firefighter. The best thing about 30 minuts was how their words were combined with the aerial images of the area, in such a way that the viewer understood perfectly the authentic potential of prevention. There is that litany that is said every year in the midst of the catastrophe: “Summer fires are put out in winter.” Let's see if those who are supposed to be in charge watch the report.

The CEO of La Séptima, Miguel Ángel Contreras, presented this new free-to-air channel and made an effort to distance himself from the notion that it is a television station to the greater glory of Pedro Sánchez. But shortly after the informative breakfast in which he participated, the government delegation in Madrid issued a tweet that included statements from the executive such as: “In the realm of the progressive world, there is an absolute and total void right now.” It was nothing short of a missile against La Sexta, the channel he co-founded two decades ago and which is supposed to be Atresmedia’s left-wing television station. (Apart from also ignoring La1, whose political leaning I assume there is no need to detail). But what is surprising is that an institutional account would echo it, because the statements are not from the government delegate, but from a private investor trying his luck in the difficult television business dominated by the duopoly giants (more than half of the audience and four-fifths of the advertising).

Although it will not begin broadcasting until November 5th, the new free-to-air DTT channel already carries the stigma of being born as a communicative lever in favor of a PSOE in flagrant media and, above all, television minority. The company's CEO, José Miguel Contreras, has tried to shake off this notion by labeling it as "stupidity." He did so during an informative breakfast in which he outlined some of the issues that have accompanied the project since the Spanish government awarded them the television channel, ahead of the bid presented by Mediaset.

Miquel Fernández (Barcelona, 1980) has a long career in theater, cinema, and television. He has appeared in series such as Nit i dia, La Riera, Cites, Benvinguts a la família and Fariña and has demonstrated his talent as a singer in various musicals and the contest Tu cara me suena, which he won. Now, however, he takes on one of the biggest challenges of his career: playing Ferran Adrià inGènesi, the series about the gastronomic revolution that El Bulli represented. In addition to Fernández's performance, another of the production's assets is around seventy of El Bulli's most iconic dishes, which were cooked specifically for the filming. This Monday, the fiction, which Adrià wants to be "the best culinary series in history," premieres at the San Sebastián Festival and is released on TV3 and 3Cat. Later, Netflix will distribute it in Spain, Latin America, and the United States.

My naive hopes of finding fresh topics upon returning from vacation collide with the harsh reality of stagnant politics. Ceuta and Melilla continue to dominate the conversation. But there are interesting movements. El País has published a column by the Franco-Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun in which he argues that returning the two autonomous cities would be “a historical and realistic gesture” on the part of Spain, which would thus resolve “a colonization that no longer makes sense”. Not all the thunderbolts of Zeus can be compared to the avalanche of criticism received by the newspaper for publishing this opinion. The issue is so taboo that merely considering it already merits being sent straight to the stake.

Since streaming platforms appeared, the range of series available to us is greater than ever. At the same time, the waiting time between one season and another is becoming longer. This gap is starting to have an impact on viewing data, according to a study by the data company Luminate, which analyzes cultural consumption. A wait of at least a year and a half translates into a considerable loss of viewers.

This week Jordi Basté denounced, in his opening segment of El món a RAC1, the manipulation of the text of the play Dones de ràdio which was broadcast on Monday evening on TV3. At the beginning of the performance, the character of Rosa, played by actress Àngels Gonyalons, mentions that she works at RAC1. Basté's team, knowing the public television's historical reservations regarding the rival station, checked whether that reference to RAC1 had been respected. And they hit the mark. Gonyalons' intervention was mutilated. At the time of writing this article, the censored version can still be found on the 3Cat platform. If you retrieve it, you will be able to observe how, at the beginning of the play, just after Gonyalons' character explains that she hosts a radio program on one of the country's main stations, there is a cutaway shot of actress Sara Diego listening to her colleague that serves to make the cut go unnoticed.

In 2019, the newspaper El Mundo launched a campaign with the slogan "The truth, however uncomfortable it may be". Over time, this phrase has become institutionalized and the newspaper uses it regularly to promote itself. I thought about this when, this week, I read a report on Ceuta that certainly caused discomfort among its own readers, as could be seen in the comments section.

Marcos Franz (Mataró, 1993) became famous thanks to his participation in Merlí, where he played Gerard. It was his gateway to television and the world of acting, but he did not enjoy it because at that time he was trapped in a manipulative relationship that destroyed him psychologically. The actor now speaks about this experience in the book Cuando dejé de ser yo (Alienta Editorial).

On Thursday evening, actress María Valverde was the guest on La revuelta on La 1. During the conversation, the host, David Broncano, reminded her that during the previous stage of the program on Movistar+ –La resistencia–, her most viral video was the one of her answering the program's traditional uncomfortable question about the frequency of her sexual activity. They claimed that the video had more than twenty-five million views. She lamented that those statements haunted her for a long time, making her discomfort obvious. Broncano invited her to repeat what she said that day, but she avoided talking about it, letting him be the one to recall the facts. Even so, he asked her the two classic questions they ask everyone again: the money they have in the bank and sexual activity in the last month, scoring the different acts, in which intercourse is worth more points than petting or masturbation. Valverde also warned that that assessment made no sense at all.The questions in La revuelta have an evident component of coercion of the guest in which the limits of consent become ambiguous. In case of not wanting to answer, the protagonist is forced to refuse publicly, in front of the cameras. There is always the insistence of the presenter, which prolongs the tension. The refusal, furthermore, also allows for a public interpretation regarding the reasons behind it. It brings all the guests to the epicenter of a story about sex and money that not everyone can or wants to sustain. On the other hand, intimacy is subordinated to the media interest of the program. The program is aware that the answers guarantee virality on social media. La revuelta profits from people's sex lives. The possibility of answering the questions is also associated with a false idea of liberation and disinhibition. Or rather, not wanting to answer can be interpreted as a lack of transparency or sexual repression. And this can condition the guest's will. The public reacts to the answers by issuing a judgment on whether it is okay, too little, or too much. The virality of social networks causes a loss of control over the framework in which the dialogue was consented to. The guest accepts an interview limited in time, in a specific personal and social context, usually linked to the promotion of something. Virtual circulation causes an indefinite and eternal multiplication of the conversation, and their discourse is reduced to a thirty-second video. On the other hand, establishing a points scale for different types of sexual acts, in which sexual intercourse with penetration is the star category, confirms the most simplistic and retrograde heterobasic approach typical of the program.What La revuelta does, beyond promoting viral exposure at the expense of taboos and people's sex lives, is to normalize and encourage the judgment of people's private lives. These are approaches typical of the sleaziest and most vulgar tabloid press.

Last Saturday, the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, published on his website the article "We must pace the frontier", in which he asked the AI industry to slow down the pace of improvement of their models. Five days later, the rotating chairman of Huawei, Eric Xu, responded to him from Shanghai: Chinese AI providers "still do not have enough computing or model capacity" to perceive the same risks that are being discussed in the US, and perhaps "they need to accelerate the pace until they can notice them too". One proposes to brake because he already sees them (and also because he does not want any rival to get ahead of him); the other wants to run to get there. Underneath this debate lie two technically very different ways of building artificial intelligence.

Insomniac Games, one of the flagship studios of PlayStation Studios, leaves behind the successful Spider-Man saga and bets on a new hero from the Marvel comics universe. The shift in tone towards a much darker, adult and visceral title is remarkable, since its creators are also responsible for family-friendly and iconic sagas like Spyro or the charismatic Ratchet & Clank. Marvel: Wolverine, the official name of the game Marvel’s Wolverine in Spain, arrives as this year's big exclusive for the PlayStation 5 console (with the permission of Saros).

Just as last weekend in Spain right-wing people were in favor of Madrid and Formula 1 and left-wingers against it, now the same thing has happened again with the gesture of the Real Madrid stars who did not want to wear the solidarity shirt with Ceuta. While the right-wing press is crucifying them and practically demanding their public stoning, the progressive press has come to the players' rescue. The newspaper El País publishes this Friday an editorial sympathetic to at least one of the players involved, Kylian Mbappé, who is also the only one who has given explanations, in this case to the newspaper As, which, oh surprise, also belongs to the Prisa group. The most curious thing is that when this newspaper published the full interview with the player, it omitted this part.

In Madrid, they still have not digested the act of rebellion by Vinícius, Mbappé, and Konaté in refusing to wear a solidarity shirt for the people of Ceuta. So much so that now they are starting to fire, by elevation, at Florentino Pérez. The best example is an article signed by Kike Marín – a sports journalist with long experience who has worked for Mark andAs– a El Confidencial titled "The offense of Mbappé, Vinícius and Konaté in Ceuta, another symptom of the lack of control at Real Madrid". The journalist points to one of Pérez's main advisors, the Moroccan-born Anas Laghari, as being responsible for this lack of control and for some decisions that are difficult for Madrid fans to understand, such as the low profile the club has adopted regarding the Ceuta cause. "The simple fact that the honorary president of Real Madrid, José Martínez Pirri, even if it is from Ceuta it should embarrass Mbappé, Vinícius and Konaté", he writes. "It seems that the club is slipping out of Florentino's hands", he concludes.

The management of TV3 will open an internal investigation to find out why a mention of RAC1 was censored during Monday's broadcast of the play Dones de ràdio after Jordi Basté reported the case on El món a RAC1. During the Davantal segment, the journalist explained that in the play, the character played by Àngels Gonyanols makes a mention of RAC1: she is a journalist who works at a successful station and specifies that it is RAC1. Instead, when TV3 broadcast the play, the mention of RAC1 disappeared.

This week marks one year since TV3 premiered the new set for the Telenotícies and launched the 3CatInfo universe. After a large financial investment and months of self-promotion, the renovation was sold as a turning point for the public television news programs. One year later, the results allow us to call that into question. The technical flourishes that seemed like something special have resulted in the same old inertia. There was talk of much more dynamic sets thanks to robotic cameras. The forty-meter screen was supposed to allow for more organic and natural movements from the presenters. After a few shaky tracking shots, the news programs are as static as they were before. Beyond a tacky zoom in the style of Lazarov to kick off the TN migdia, we see no relevant dynamism. To close the Telenotícies, they have to show us the cameras in a wide shot taken with a crane. It seems they show us those huge contraptions to justify the change and the expense. But, for the viewers, visually it has made no difference.While news programs from the most prestigious networks in Europe tend to create more diaphanous and lighter spaces, the new sets are cluttered. The vertical totems cause distortions in proportions, and the step to access them limits movement. A resource that, instead of facilitating the work, has complicated it. It has forced the recording of fragments of the Telenotícies in the news analysis sections because they do not trust that live dynamics can withstand the section without problems. It is logical: errors and blunders are frequent. It was said that the format would allow graphics to be more exportable to mobile screens. An insignificant aspect that is more of a sales argument than a practical and tangible reality. The graphic design has already become outdated and in the set there is a saturation of semiotics. They want to give so many messages that the set is nonsense. On one hand, the view over Barcelona. Above, planet Earth. On the side, the projection of orange human shadows that simulate a newsroom moving in an unsettling way behind the presenters. What sense does it make to falsify reality in a news program that must convey truth? It was also announced that in the new stage, the editions would be more differentiated. The TN comarques was supposed to have “more practical contribution and experiences that would inspire”. But, for the moment, we see almost the same thing as in the TN migdia. One of the two great stars of the Telenotícies, Raquel Sans, who was taking on a new role giving more weight to the weekend evenings, has disappeared for four months. She has been on sick leave after participating in La travessa VIP, a program with precarious audience. Robbing Peter to pay Paul.3CatInfo, meanwhile, conveys the poverty it was already dragging along. It still looks God-forsaken, with some poorly edited news bulletins and that feeling of a boring, inhospitable, and lonely workspace. A year later, the change does not seem to justify the investment. More smoke and mirrors than television results.

Today is a day when culers, and anti-Madridistas in general, can sit back and eat popcorn while the White House implodes. The refusal of Mbappé, Vinícius, and Konaté to wear a solidarity shirt with Ceuta before the match against Elche has sparked an authentic pitched battle on social media and has fractured Madridismo into two irreconcilable camps. On one hand, there are those who consider these three players traitors to Spain and to the values of the club that pays them, and who, therefore, must be expelled from Real Madrid. And then there are those who consider that politics and sports should not be mixed and downplay it. What is happening? Well, the former are the ones who identify most with the stances of the PP and Vox, and accuse the latter (and the players themselves) of playing into Pedro Sánchez's hands. This is how, for example, Zabala de la Serna writes in El Mundo.

On Monday evening, the Atresmedia group counter-programmed itself with some symptomatic television offerings. On Antena 3, on El hormiguero, Pablo Motos interviewed the president of Ceuta, Juan Jesús Vivas, to talk about the migration crisis. In the city, the local business community even organized giant screens to follow the broadcast collectively. Meanwhile, on La Sexta, the political satire space El intermedio interviewed Pedro Sánchez. It is a way of guaranteeing the satisfaction of the different ideological sensibilities of the viewers.In the battle of the ratings, in Catalonia they were secondary options, and the Spanish president came out on top. It gathered 206,000 viewers and Vivas 115,000. In Spain it went the other way around. El hormiguero was the second most-watched program of the day, with just over two million viewers, while Sánchez brushed against one and a half million.While Motos was stirring the pot of the Ceuta epic, El Gran Wyoming and Pedro Sánchez put the stones to sleep with an anodyne interview to go through the motions. Conscious of the political complexity of the moment, the host had a deflated mood and only on rare occasions added, out of a sense of duty, some humorous tag to the question. Pedro Sánchez dragged out his answers so much and Wyoming had so little desire to follow up or scrutinize the arguments that it became boring. The host had no desire at all to complicate his life or to complicate it for Sánchez. The result was unworthy of what current events demand right now. We need more attentive and sharp journalism, especially in front of a Prime Minister who escaped with evasions and a lot of rhetoric. Sandra Sabatés's desire for rigor was a mere facade. Paradoxically, the most necessary and concrete questions were asked by two citizens of Ceuta through a video. And even then, no clear and committed response was obtained from Pedro Sánchez. The most sarcastic questions were assists, short and to the foot, for the President to attack political opponents and judges. Wyoming's discomfort evidenced his compassion for the guest. At the end of the interview, the host thanked him with a circumspect tone and accompanied it with a dose of encouragement: “Strength, because morally it must be complicated”, he wished him with his head bowed. A strange farewell for a sharp humor program.On Tuesday, the news programs echoed the most prominent statements by Pedro Sánchez and Juan Jesús Vivas. Years ago, it was the comedy shows that followed in the wake of the political interviews conducted by the most seasoned journalists. Now it is the other way around. The news programs must feed on what they gather from comedy spaces. These are programs that do not conduct interviews with alternative content, but rather imitate the codes typical of the political genre. Neither entertainment could aspire to more, nor journalism to less. And all of this says very little for the political class, which increasingly avoids specialized professionals.

Tempered at The Objective, hired by Abc for her investigations into PSOE corruption, a panelist on esRadio and Horizonte... Ketty Garat has become a new shining star of the 'fatxosfera' (right-wing sphere). In one of her latest appearances on Federico Jiménez Losantos' program, he asks her, as the daughter of a military man, what her opinion is of the photograph taken of King Felipe VI with the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, and the heads of the three branches of the armed forces: land, sea, and air. And Garat replies: "My father was not only an admiral, but also a member of the Navy leadership, and that forces me to be prudent, but I have my own personal opinion. There is a deep conviction right now, not only in the military sphere but also in the realm of justice, of the Prosecutor's Office, that this government is a democratic danger, it is a threat to democracy".

The host of Versió Rac1, Toni Clapés, has announced that this will be the last year of the program with him at the helm. "This year, when I returned, I thought I've had enough," said Clapés in an interview on Bàsics de Betevé. During the conversation with Sandra Mestres, the broadcaster explains that "it is the year to finish" and that he has the feeling "of having completed a fantastic cycle". This year, Versió Rac1 turns 30. "It's been many years. I have the decision quite made," asserts Clapés. The broadcaster's announcement comes a few days after the change in leadership at the head of the station: Eulàlia Carbonell left the position last week and will be replaced by Francesc Cano.